MagSafe 2 45 replacement cables

loulou41

Son bought an extra MagSafe when he bought his MacBook Air. He left the spare at home and it is only used over the weekend. It has now packed up and it was not cheap. He The reason he got a spare to avoid carrying it back and forth to avoid damage. I think it was about £45 from a third party. The adapter that came with his MacBook is still working. Only two years old, he is looking to buy a replacement from a good company. Any recommendation pl, thanks?

System

Apple or one of their authorised resellers/repair centres. DO NOT BUY A THIRD PARTY MACBOOK CHARGER. Macbooks are pretty much the only laptop there is where you do not want to be buying third party chargers. Apple's laptops talk to the chargers, especially during startup. The Apple chargers don't just put out one single voltage like regular laptop chargers do but vary at specific levels between 5V and 20V, the voltage being determined by the SMC chip inside the laptop communicating with a chip inside the charger to tell it what to output. Most third party chargers do not communicate properly with the SMC chip and the result is the batteries die prematurely. If you use the official chargers a battery in a Macbook should last donkeys years. Mine is 4 years old, has had 738 charge cycles and is still at 84% of its original new capacity. The vast majority of laptops, even £1000+ ones, would be on their second or third battery by now.

loulou41

https://www.coywood.co.uk/apple-45w-magsafe-2-power-adapter-for-macbook-air-10320-p.asp. This is the company He bought it only used over the weekend for past two years. I thought it was genuine Your thoughts pl.

System

It claims it is and looking at the photos if its not its a damned good copy. When he got it did it come with a small three pin adapter that clips onto the charger body as well as a long mains cable with a plug on one end that can be interchanged with that 3 plug adapter? Was the charger itself in a clear plastic film packaging wrapper with cutouts where the plug adapter and the opposite corners where the fold out cable wrapping points are so you could actually use the charger without removing this packaging? Also along one edge there should be all the things like the various certification logos in a light grey.

All those are what are on the genuine replacement charger. If you've still got the original charger just compare them side by side and check they're the same. There's always a slight minor difference in even the best knock offs. Just the weight and feel of the thing, especially the cable that goes from the charger to the magsafe connector, tend to be enough to tell.

Just seen where Coywood are, they're only 20 miles away. Its a small local computer store. That doesn't necessarily mean they're not genuine chargers. When I used to have an IT business I used to go to IT auctions where it would be commonplace to find boxes of genuine chargers for sale, often from say Curries/PC World Knowhow repair department of old spares stock they were liquidating. I'd occasionally buy the odd box of Thinkpad and Dell ones when they came up as that's what I specialised in.